... susan ...
... briante ...

m a y
d a y

And I think about the beautiful production, the general strike, the poem before a poem, and I wonder if the riot thinks.

Utopia bends toward form like a live oak toward the street. The May Day mind worries: Is the poem work? Squirrel on the grass, dog at the edge of his leash, clover blossoming in a gesture recognizable to those of us born to improvise an audience for our bloom.

If we could diagram this movement, if we could flowchart this season—

spring is work worth repeating, production not strictly measured by GDP, that makes visible: wind, sex, decay, my husband cutting the roots of the dead Japanese Maple, kindling for the chimenea, a new sundress, should the sun ever.

Mao Zedong says: “There is great disorder under heaven. The situation is excellent.”

A shock of branch trembles like a nerve against skull. A squirrel freezes way up the live oak. The sound you hear may be water, siren, insect, engine. Sound is not labor, light

burrows into the canopy of the black walnut tree: past synapse, politics, poem. Clover may be crushed under feet or freed from all obligation to feed a blossom-clad riot, a season of flower and hunger out of which we step.

gall e r y
wa ll s

Women wash in the ruins of a stone house. A child cups water from a stream to lift into an infant’s mouth. In the Pablo Picasso museum, I look at newsreels, photographs of Spanish Civil War atrocities, Picasso’s Guernica studies: a crying woman, lips opened up like a bowl to the sky, scream in the shape of a knife rising out.

Not scream, but hands still wet from laundry, I want the wall to display every sketch made by a mother’s gaze across the smoke on a horizon.

You never look someone in the eye walking down a New York City street, my brother tells his daughter walking down a Tucson street. A glass door swings open

at the army surplus store, reflections appear out of order,
irrational. I’m tired of men
telling women when to look or look away.

Shopping mall, hospital, nursing home, detention center, the whole world has become a series of containers. For three days, Joseph Beuys lived with a coyote in the small back room of a New York City gallery for a performance piece called “I like America and America likes me.”

Was the coyote capitalism or nation?

If we deal with things as they are: the coyote is nothing but coyote, and the woman with the bowl of her lips cupping the knife of a scream is a woman with the bowl of her lips cupping the knife of a scream. And my father in a nursing home not eating is my father in a nursing home not eating.

But they are also coyote and capitalism and a blow to the heart. Flying home after her father’s death, my friend said she felt such pain her chest, she learned grief changes the shape of muscle and artery.

Shut up and look at this image of birds migrating in the early morning, said my Twitter feed.

I saw bare trees. Horses at the edge of the field. Black birds inscribed like shrapnel across a sky pulled together by what sense? Once at sunset, I watched bats unfurl from under a bridge over a river into a ribbon of black lace.

A ribbon passed down, stitched and improvised as a scream, as the rip of an eye across the horizon scanning for the mouth of the child plucked like a flower, promised water, a scream in the shape of a blade. My mother’s suffering made no words, cut nothing.

Keep me behind glass pacing like a coyote to defend. I give you this world, daughter, a coin toss, which coin drops on sidewalk, which chimes in the cash box. All of my scratches and starts, on no gallery wall, knife spit

into these lines sharpening.